Um, do we also have to admit there’s something compelling about his creepy, Cold-War-era xenophobia?

Are we sufficiently advanced and resourceful that we could survive a cataclysm here on earth?

No. What makes this fellow think Mars would be any better, I’m not sure. “In the long run a single-planet species will not survive,” he says. Or, to frame it another way in the context of our current knowledge: “In the long run no species will survive.”